Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963. Walter Hooper
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then, I look like all babies.’
215 William Wordsworth, ‘Ode, Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’ (1807), 63-6: ‘Not in entire forgetfulness,/And not in utter nakedness,/ But trailing clouds of glory do we come/From God, who is our home.’
216 i.e., Florence ‘Michal’ Williams, the widow of Charles Williams.
217 Lewis forgot he had asked Bles, in his letter of 20 October, to remove the words from The Sliver Chair.
218 Romans 8:26-7: ‘We know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.’
219 Luke 18:2: ‘And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint.’
220 Luke 22:42.
221 Mark 11:24: ‘Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them and ye shall have them.’
222 Charles Williams, Evelyn Underhill, George MacDonald.
223 John 3:16.
224 1 John 2:15.
225 Revelation 18:4.
226 Mrs Gebbert had asked if Lewis would autograph a copy of The Stiver Chair for her son, Charles Marion Gebbert.
227 The Bermuda Summit, 4-8 December 1953, was held at the initiative of Sir Winston Churchill and included Britain, the United States, France and the USSR. In the aftermath of loseph Stalin’s death and the Soviet development of a hydrogen bomb, Churchill hoped to gain President Eisenhower’s support for a top-level dialogue with the new Soviet leadership. He was motivated primarily by a wish to break the stalemate of the Cold War and avert a possible nuclear conflict.
228 Panama was Queen Elizabeth II’s and Prince Philip’s first port of call (29 November 1953) on their visit to Australia, which was part of the Queen’s first Commonwealth tour.
229 The letter is unsigned.
230 Sir Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), publisher, was the son of Edward Unwin, a London printer. In 1904 he joined his lather’s stepbrother, T. Fisher Unwin, in his publishing firm. At 28 he began his own firm and soon afterwards bought George Allen & Sons. With the new company, George Allen & Unwin, he quickly built a formidable list of authors. In 1926 Unwin published The Truth about Publishing, which became the authoritative textbook on the subject. He was a tireless worker, but spared time for his other passion–tennis, which he played every weekend throughout the year. In 1937, acting on the recommendation of his ten-year-old son, Rayner, he published Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Again at the recommendation of Rayner, he published The Lord of the Rings. Because that book was so difficult to describe, Unwin asked Lewis if he would write something to serve as a ‘blurb’ for its cover. Lewis included such a piece with this letter. Unwin was knighted in 1946.
231 Mrs Farrer took exception to Lewis’s portrayal of God as, not male, but masculine. In That Hideous Strength, ch. 14, part V, p. 350, Ransom tells Jane Studdock: ‘You are offended by the masculine itself: the loud, irruptive, possessive thing–the gold lion, the bearded bull–which breaks through hedges and scatters the carefully made bed. The male you could have escaped, for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it.’ that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’
232 Lewis was referring to the love of the dwarf, Gimli, for Galadriel, Queen of the Elves, in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 7: ‘The Dwarf, hearing the names given in his own ancient tongue, looked up and met her eyes, and it seemed to him that he looked suddenly into the heart of an enemy and saw there love and understanding.’
233 In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bk. II, ch. 8, ‘Farewell to Lórien’, the Fellowship takes leave of the security of Lothlórien to destroy the Ring.
234 In the final chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the noble Boromir covets the Ring so badly he tries to take it from Frodo: ‘“It is by our own folly that our Enemy will defeat us,” cried Boromir. “How it angers me! Fool! Obstinate fool! Running wilfully to death and ruining our cause. If any mortals have claim to the Ring, it is the men of Númenor, and not Halflings. It is not yours save by unhappy chance. It might have been mine. It should be mine. Give it to me!”’
235 See the letter to Sir Stanley Unwin of 4 December 1953.
236 ‘make haste slowly’.
237 The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC).
238 Lewis was referring to D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.
239 ibid., Preface, p. 12: ‘It would be affectation to pretend that I know whether Mr. Harding’s attempt, in its present form, will work. Very possibly not. One hardly expects the first, or the twenty-first, rocket to the Moon to make a good landing. But it is a beginning.’
240 See Dorothy L. Sayers in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1065-72.
241 Lewis had received one of Sayers’ Christmas cards. The text, ‘The Days of Christ’s Coming’, was by Sayers, with a painting by Fritz Wegner, and the card was printed by Hamish Hamilton. The picture had 27 numbered doors to be opened from 14 December to 7 January
242 Kathleen Nott had just published The Emperor’s Clothes (London: Heinemann, 1953), described on the jacket